


‘Your hair Sam, it’s magnificent.’

by mollrach13



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: ohsam, Episode s13e13, Gen, Hair, Hair Mutilation?, Haircuts, Sam Winchester Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sam's Hair, Self-Mutilation, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 07:19:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14515263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollrach13/pseuds/mollrach13
Summary: Sam stood there and stared into the mirror. A man stared back at him. It was man that Sam hardly recognised.





	‘Your hair Sam, it’s magnificent.’

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: mental disassociation, not self-harm but self-mutilation (of hair). For the following prompt at the 2018 OhSam Birthday Meme: Hurt vs Comfort. Filling the Hurt side of things.   
> "Sam goes to the barbers, it goes horribly wrong" which turned into "Sam has a haircut, it goes horribly wrong".   
> Minor dialogue spoilers for 13x13.

Sam stood there and stared into the mirror. A man stared back at him. It was man that Sam hardly recognised. Sam watched as the man turned his head this way, then that way. He watched the man’s hands clench by his sides. He watched the man’s jaw tick and his Adam’s apple bop with a swallow. 

He didn’t look into the man’s eyes. He avoided them; too afraid of all he would see there. The closest he came was to stare along the outline of the man’s hair where its long tendrils swept over his forehead. 

‘Your hair Sam, it’s magnificent.’

The man in the mirror flinched. Almost as if the voice had come from within this very room; whispered over his shoulder in the dark. 

Sam watched as the man’s hand came up and touched the ends of his hair; at the strands that tickled the corners of his jaw. The man twisted them between his fingers, feeling the soft texture. 

‘Is that leave in conditioner you have there?’

The man’s hand tightened, clutching about a fist full of hair, and pulled. It looked like it should hurt but the man didn’t react. He didn’t feel anything.

The man in the mirror looked down and Sam followed his eyesight to the thick pair of scissors resting on the bathroom side. Sam frowned. They looked like Dean’s kitchen scissors. He wondered how they had ended up in his bathroom. 

Slowly he reached out a hand and thread his large fingers through the scissor handle. Experimentally he flexed his fingers, opening the blades and closing them with a smooth whisper of metal on metal that ended in a snap. 

Looking back in the mirror the man before him fingered the ends of his hair. 

Sam remembered when Jess used to do that; mindlessly twisting the ends of his hair between her fingers as they laid together watching TV. Sam remembered how his favourite hugs from his Dad were the ones where John would thread his hand through the hair at the back of Sam’s head and pull him in, strong and safe. Sam remembered how Dean would squeeze the base of his neck in reassurance when he was sad or sick, his fingers scratching into the hair there. 

The man in the mirror took a fist full of hair and held it out to the side. 

Sam also remembered large clawed hands pulling at his hair. Holding him down, forcing him back. He remembered breath as cold as ice whispering across his neck as a lizard tongue lapped at the hairs at his nape. 

The man in the mirror raised the scissors. 

Sam remembered mocking hands running through his hair as he crumbled and broke. He remembered a voice telling him that he was all he had now. That this was home now. 

There was a ‘snick’ of metal against metal and then the man in the mirror gripped another handful of hair. 

Sam remembered pain so intense that he gripped hands into his own hair, pulling it out in chunks that littered the emptiness around him. 

Another clip reverberated through the bathroom and the man raised his scissors again, faster this time, chopping and cutting and slicing. Again and again and again and again…

‘You’ll never escape here,’ a voice whispered into Sam’s ear. ‘You were made for me. All mine.’

The cold breath tickled at the hairs around Sam’s ear and the man in the mirror pulled the hairs away, slicing at them roughly with his scissors. 

“Sam?” a voice called through the darkness. But Sam couldn’t look away from the man in the mirror, his hands moving at speed now, cutting indiscriminately. 

“Sam?” the voice called again. “You seen the Impala keys? I’m gonna go get dinner.”

There was the sound of a handle turning, the door latch grinding against its casing, and then the bathroom was filled with light. It made Sam wince with the brightness of it and he screwed his eyes up against the glare. He hadn’t realised just how dark the bathroom had been. 

“Sam?” the voice asked again, uncertain this time, a waver in its deep tone that wasn’t normally there. Dean, Sam reminded himself. It was Dean. 

“Sam what the hell!” 

Dean was angry. Or was that his scared voice? Sam couldn’t tell anymore past the ringing in his ears. Suddenly there was a tugging at his hand and Sam opened his eyes to see Dean forcing a pair of scissors from his fingers. 

“Sammy what did you do!”

No, that wasn’t Dean’s angry voice. He was devastated. 

Sam looked up and met Dean’s wide eyed stare. His brother’s face was pale and his eyes were bright and shining wet with tears. Sam opened his mouth to ask what was wrong but nothing came out. Nothing but a strangled murmur. 

Then Dean was pushing him back, manhandling him by the shoulders to sit on the closed toilet lid. He was yelling and shouting and pressing towels against Sam’s scalp. 

“I…uh,” Sam said as he found his voice again. “I didn’t…. I couldn’t look at it.”

“Look at what Sam?” Dean roared. “Your hair? Jesus. Just... sit.”

Dean disappeared. It didn’t occur to Sam to disobey Dean and move. He sat there in the bathroom and looked at the devastation he had left. Thick brown hair littered the floor in uneven clumps. Dotted between the errant piles were little spots. 

A stinging at his crown made him wince and Sam raised his hand to the spot. There was something wet and tacky there. When he brought his hand back down to his eyesight thick red coated his fingertips. Blood, his mind supplied. 

Gingerly he pushed himself upwards to stand and came to stand back in front of the mirror. 

Sam looked at the man in the mirror. He looked like a horror. Blood dripped down the side of his face. Cuts and scrapes littered his empty scalp, dispersed every now and then by a stray clump of hair. 

When Dean returned to the bathroom, first aid kit in hand, Sam was still stood there looking at himself in the mirror. Sam caught his brother’s eyes in the reflection of the mirror and couldn’t comprehend the heartbreak he could see there. 

Because the man staring back at him in the mirror was a mess. He was bloody and broken and scarred. But at least Sam finally recognised himself.


End file.
